Not just mass shooters…
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How about we not delve into qanon levels of speculation… He HIT trump that much we know…
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The British merchant navy company I trained with had a gun club. The range was actually under our accomodation. We were defacto members of the club but there was no compulsion to take part. Some of us did because we were already familiar with guns (farm boys, scouts/boys’ brigade, CCF etc) and the fact that some of the routes our ships took were through pirate waters. (West coast of Africa, Red Sea, Mallaca Straits etc) and it was felt that it would add to our engineering knowledge too. I visited a ZIM Israel ship in an African port to swap film reels (The 80’s was an intersting time) and my opposite number showed me the armoury on board… Racks of sub machine guns (possibly UZI’s but Im not really sure), boxes of grenades of various stripes.
I only ever saw one gun on a British flagged ship (an automatic possibly a small calibre Browning) that that particular Old Man (Captain) kept in his personal safe. Some of us had practice with it sinking a barrel bouy with a flag that we’d used on a Williamson Turn exercise. We couldn’t retrieve it as the weather had got up and it was too rough to launch the (very open) lifeboat to retrieve it. The reason the Old Man kept a gun was that he had been robbed in his cabin by Communist Chinese in Shanghai just after the war and wasn’t taking chances, apparently.
We British seafarers also had to sit through quite a few anti piracy MoD films showing techniques in case of pirate attack or all out war. Not fun. We were supposed to get gunned up when war started it seems. When the bit of unpleasantness with the Argentinians happened the company took us Apprentices off ships that were being sent South but P&O and Cunard kept theirs on and a class mate was one of the casualties on the Atlantic Conveyor and others earned the Medal for the conflict. In a nuke war we were all considered dead anyway…
I imagine most public schools had gun clubs too. The “huntin’ shootin’ fishin’” culture was still very much alive and of course there was the CCF (Combined Cadet Force) to gin up future Ruperts and Claude for the military.
My school? It was mostly fists, 2x4’s and knuckle dusters (that the white flight city boys brought with them). Everyone (boys and girls) had a pen knife on them to sharpen the god awful pencils the council supplied. A pencil sharpener (hand or machine) would shorten them to nothing in a blink of an eye. No one ever had anything more serious than bruises or a bloody nose in the running battles between schools or in fights, one on one. It wasn’t too rare to see a girl with her hair cut to a ragged pudding bowl.
I’ve wandered off on a tangent, soz for that.
Oh well, it’s time for a sticky, the sun is over the yardarm somewhere in the fleet.
If it’s too off topic, please Mod it away into the ether!
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… that “proves” his name and address are on a list, not how they got there
no signature, nothing in his handwriting
If somebody with a similar name made a donation and left part of the form blank, it might not be unusual for a volunteer to try to look it up somewhere, fill it in, and get it wrong
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Not the source, but a symptom.
Other countries have Olympic shooting clubs, but not in schools
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I have no idea what bearing this is supposed to have. Granted my reading was superficial, but the gun club thing was when he was a freshman in HS and at the time of the shooting he was like 2 years out of HS. So like 5-6 years later.
And guess what, dangerous, bad shooters can become good ones
I honestly don’t consider this particularly newsworthy although I know, 24 hour news cycle is gonna do it’s thing. Not sure what the hell it’s doing on boingboing though.
Perhaps the reverse at least. I cannot count the number of posts from people calling it all staged. Including people saying Trump wouldn’t care that people died to stage it. That he was a horrible shot should at least put an end to that.
I’ve seen some reporting that a segment of people feel betrayed by Trump’s softening of the public platform. Perhaps they believe it. For them, that’s a betrayal and makes him not part of the group anymore. This would be consistent with that scenario.
We don’t know the details yet. There’s some reporting that it was glass debris. Including that others were injured by debris too. Then, there’s lots of “proof” showing the teleprompters undamaged, plus some showing a teleprompter that is damaged. Along with the series of three photos showing something flying at Trump, passing him, and him grabbing his ear then. There’s some theory that it is the bullet in the photo (it’s streaked, moving faster than the digital exposure). However, it could just as easily be a glass fragment moving slower than a bullet and more likely to be visible in a photo.
We’ll know when they release a report. If they ever do. Right now, it is just Trumps word that a bullet went through his ear.
Personally, I’m more likely to believe it was glass, as I would think a bullet would do much more damage to his ear than occurred.
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I was at public school in the late 70s. We had a rifle club for target shooting, not for Combine Cadet Force because we didn’t have it. I shot a Martini action 22LR target rifle, which you can certainly kill someone with, but it’s quite a faff.
My brother was at a different school with a CCF. He got the chance to shoot a sub-machine gun on auto. That must have been cool.
Of course, all automatic weapons were banned from civilians after the Hungerford massacre in 1987. The Dunblane massacre in 1996 did for pistols and semi-auto weapons. There were no more bans after the Cumbria massacre in 2010 because there was nothing left worth banning, and criminals don’t obey the licensing laws anyway.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with target shooting as long as it’s all done in accordance with strict safety training, registration of weapons and proper licensing. The problem in the US is that anything to do with safety has been warped into suppression of the basic right to have guns and that’s how you get all these people wandering around shooting themselves quite apart from others. In the olden times, the NRA was a great advocate for gun safety training.
Sorry for the OT
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That was then, this is now.
Obviously, he practiced in the meantime.
Equally obviously, he didn’t practice enough to hit his target this time, either.
Some have described the fact that Lord Dampnut was only slightly injured to be a miracle, and that God Itself made the bullet miss.
It was nothing of the sort.
Anytime you miss your target, it’s a bad shot, so it was just a bad shot.
And if anything made the bullet miss, it was the Devil Itself, because it’s hard to find good help…
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I don’t mean to derail the discussion. But school sport shooting teams don’t practice on school grounds. At least not for public schools, because the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 would jeopardize their federal funding. The membership is made from students but as far as I know there are no public schools that practice on school grounds.
Students (their parents really) are on the hook for a rifle if their child is participating in a shooting team or gun club, because the licensing requirements are not going to make it possible to borrow or rent to minors. And it has been difficult to form any kind of competitive league among rural towns and suburbs within the same state (can’t easily compete over state lines). And it’s impractical for schools in urban areas or most suburban areas.
I would prefer schools focus on more accessible sports like archery. Which includes a similar skill set but a much lower cost for maintaining a safe range and the equipment is somewhat more affordable (about half the cost).
And frankly archery doesn’t have the horrible reputation and social baggage that firearms do today. I suspect more parents would feel more comfortable with their son or daughter on an archery team than on a shooting team. (yea, I’m biased on this one. but I still think it’s a good idea)
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I did archery in college and my kids do it from time to time.
There may be some overlapping skill set but to me archery is to shooting what sailing or competitive rowing is to motor boating. Both require skill and training to do well, certainly, but only one feels like a real “sport” to me.
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I think I would literally die if I attempted a biathlon in my current condition.
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I see some comments about archery in high school.
I swear I am not making this up.
When I was a freshman in high school in the late 70s the boy’s gym class would run laps on the track around the football field while the girl’s gym class practiced archery on the field we were running laps around.
No point to the story, the talk about archery just reminded me of something goofy.
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So… maybe NOW is the time to start doing something about the gun violence epidemic in this country, Republicans?
As if.
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Useful for the high school to front lines draft pipeline, when that was a thing.
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I am Australian. I have lived my whole life in Melbourne. I went to a selective entry public high school. I was a member of my high school rifle-shooting team.
I am also very much not a representative sample.
Looking further through the thread: my school did not do archery, but I joined the SCA, and did archery there. For the record, I was also in the Army Cadets for a year. I left after that year because it turns out I really, really suck in even a cosplaying military context.
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Some shooting sports fans think this is unfair but c’mon; when was the last time a lone archer slaughtered dozens of innocent people in one go? It’s just not a pastime that lends itself to mass murder.
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Crossbows however are.
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Read any British press in the kast week or so?
Spoiler alert for movie in which that happens.
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